THEATRE: The culture of dependence

A Man and Some Women Quaker Friars, Bristol

So, Rutherford and Son wasn't a one-off wonder. The Bristol company Show of Strength has unearthed another Githa Sowerby family drama, A Man and Some Women, and, though the plotting isn't a patch on Rutherford, Sowerby's intelligent and heartfelt examination of the price of personal freedom makes compelling theatre.

Everyone we meet in the play is dependent, either financially or emotionally or both, on Richard, the man of the title. For years he has stoically endured his role, sacrificing his scientific ambition to pay the bills. To give a little dignity to his unmarried sisters who live in his house, he has even pretended that their meagre allowance came from their mother who rejected them. However, how agreeable this kind of enforced dependence is for either party rests on the attittudes of both. Only Jessica, afamily friend who is secretly in love with Richard, has observed that when a relationship acquires a price tag, it might also be stamped with a best-by date.

What makes Sowerby's writing so good is her alertness to the complexities of human motivation, male as well as female. Rose, the venomously disgruntled spinster (Sheila Hannon), tears other people's characters apart with the same savagery with which she rips up strips of calico for her charity work. While she has a clear sense of charity, it certainly doesn't begin at home: her spying on Richard and Jessica, and her misreading of their relationship, trigger the explosion of all sorts of uncomfortable truths.

Staged within a dimly lit, fat-walled chapel, Caroline Hunt's atmospheric production communicates a sense of life under siege. Playing it almost in the round adds to the claustrophobia of the piece, and yet the production lacks the sense of place that made Rutherford so vivid.

The cast works hard but too often the characters are realised with a limited range of crass mannerisms - pursed mouth, jutting jaw and so on - that inclines them towards stereotype. Perhaps the director is taking her cue from the vague and emblematic title. But to have made these people real, rounded and specific would have tripled the play's emotional punch.

n To 28 January, Quaker Friars, Bristol (0272 537735)